A lot of people say it's better to focus on the process itself than the outcome

(or end result). For example, if you are studying, there are two ways to go
about it:
1. Outcome-focused: Studying to get a good grade in a class you are
taking.
2. Process-focused: Studying because you enjoy learning the material
itself.
This has always seemed to make sense to me. If you enjoy the process, you
are going to be happier when trying to do productive things.
And you will also be more disciplined because you are more likely to do
something you enjoy.
The problem is, very few people tell you how to actually do this.
So, I decided I would put together a method to focus more on the process. It
isn't a magical solution that works instantaneously, but hopefully can help
someone out there.

Method for Shifting Focus From Outcome to Process

Overview: One of the biggest reasons it can be hard to focus on the process
is that there are often negatives in the process that occupy our mind.
For example, with studying, there are a lot of potential negatives involved:
 The intense concentration needed to read and retain information.
 The stress involved. Especially when we worry about whether we've
studied enough, feel guilty for procrastinating, etc.
 The pressure from society/family/peers to do well.
 In some cases, a dislike of the material
So how to we fix this?
The idea of this method is to shift to thinking increasingly less about the end
results and more about the process itself, by finding things you like about
the process.
Let's take studying as an example again.
Step 1: Start by finding a morsel of something you like in that process.
This is just an exploratory phase so no pressure to figure it out right away.
For studying, there are many potential positives:
 The satisfaction of knowing you are acquiring new knowledge.
 The fascination of learning new/interesting material (even if it's overall
not as interesting, maybe there is some interesting aspect)
 The feeling that you are accomplishing something productive.
Keep working on this step until you've found at least one element you like
about whatever you are doing.
Step 2: Now that you've found something you like, start concentrating on
that aspect you like, whenever possible. It's totally fine if the things you
don't like pop in your mind too.
Practice this step for at least several days, perhaps weeks or longer, before
moving on to Step 3.
Step 3: After working on the previous steps for a while, you can move on to
the final step. For this step, whenever your mind shifts to thinking about the
outcome or the negative aspects of the process, try to shift it back to
thinking about those things you like.
For example, if you think about the pressure to get a good grade and start
getting stressed, shift your focus to just reading the material because you
find some of it interesting. And take that pressure off yourself.
Keep repeating this step. As time goes on, you will start focusing more and
more time on the process, and less and less time on the outcome. It probably
won't ever be 100% perfect, but that's totally fine. Even going from 0%
process-focus to 50% process-focus would be a huge achievement.
Final words:
For me, this method has worked really well and made me focus a lot more on
the process for certain things (e.g. weight lifting, working, etc.)
It's definitely not perfect - there are still plenty of times the outcome enters
my mind.
But by focusing on the process more than I used to, I've been a lot happier
when doing productive things.
And that's also made me a lot more disciplined because it's easier for me to
motivate myself to do things I like (or at least don't hate as much!)